Queen

Today’s song is another classic in my final week of 365Songs for this year: Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. First released on their 1978 album Jazz, Don’t Stop Me Now has gone on to become one of the best known Queen songs, and one of my favourites! If it’s your first time on the site, find out more about the 365 Songs project or see all of my December songs here.

I saw a bit of Happy Feet Two this evening and it reminded me that I’d never played Queen’s Somebody To Love which was one of the main songs in the original Happy Feet movie. Somebody To Love dates from 1976 and ever since has been one of the all-time Queen classic songs. After Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991, George Michael sang this song at the tribute concert at Wembley and his performance was considered to be so good that serious consideration was given to have him continue Freddie Mercury’s role and perform with the remaining members of Queen.

Today’s song is Queen’s Radio Ga Ga, or at least my ‘swing’ version of this song! Radio Ga Ga dates from 1984 and was written as a lament to the demise of radio over TV, and the rising importance of the music video over the song itself. Queen drummer Roger Taylor who wrote the song said “That’s part of what the song’s about, really. The fact that they [music videos] seem to be taking over almost from the aural side, the visual side seems to be almost more important.”

Today’s song is the wonderful Queen song A Kind of Magic dating from 1986. Written by the band’s drummer, Roger Taylor, the song was used in the film Highlander and remains one of the most well-known – and well-loved – Queen songs.

I’ve given this song a bit of a special treatment in honour of a wonderful person whose 60th birthday would have been today.

Today’s song was originally recorded by The Platters in 1957. Desperate to come up with a follow-up to the very successful Only You, Buck Ram, the band’s producer, says he wrote The Great Pretender in 20 minutes in the toilet of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. The reason I chose this song today is that it was later recorded famously by Freddie Mercury in 1987. Freddie Mercury would be celebrating his 69th birthday today.

Today is St George’s day and while there are no doubt many English songs I could play, my news feed this morning is full of all things Catalan, as St George is also the patron saint of Catalonia where he’s known as Sant Jordi. So today’s song is Barcelona, the wonderful collaboration between Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé from 1987. Freddie Mercury had been a fan of opera for many years and was very keen to collaborate with Caballé. He wrote Barcelona with Mike Moran for it to be performed at the 1992 Summer Olympics. Since Caballé’s schedule made it difficult for her to be involved in the initial recordings, Mercury sang his own part and then overdubbed the soprano parts in falsetto in the original demo recordings. I hope you enjoy my performance of this classic song.